This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of two macroeconomic factors; namely exchange rate and liquidity on stock index. The proposed study was applied in Iran and on major index of Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2001-2011. They reported that the currency exchange maintained negative impact on stock exchange for the period of investigation. This is due to the fact that when currency devalued, working capital decreases and firms did not enough money to purchase raw materials, pay wages, etc. In addition, liquidity marinated a direct and positive relationship with exchange index. However, the impact of liquidity seems to be bigger than currency exchange.

This paper investigates the effects of different factors on development of open source enterprise resources planning software packages. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 210 experts in the field of open source software package development. Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.93, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. Using Pearson correlation as well as stepwise regression analysis, the study determines three most important factors including fundamental issues, during and after implementation of open source software development. The study also determines a positive and strong relationship between fundamental factors and after implementation factors (r=0.9006, Sig. = 0.000).

This study tries to examine the roles of information technology (IT) and organizational culture in selecting an organization’s strategy using statistical methods. It is an applied and descriptive-perceptual approach. The study chooses a sample of 171 employees of Grand Tehran Municipality to examine different hypotheses of the survey. Using Pearson correlation test as well as regression analysis, the study concludes that there were some meaningful relationships between IT and selection of an organizational strategy and organizational culture, choice and significance of such strategy. Moreover, the study detected that IT and organizational culture could positively and considerably influence on such a strategy.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to measure the effects of five big personality traits on development of effective communication among middle level managers of the first private Iranian bank, Bank Eghtesade Novin, in city of Tehran, Iran. To measure the effects of five big personality traits, the study uses a questionnaire developed by Jackson (1974) [Jackson, D. N. (1974). Personality research form manual. Research Psychologists Press.]. In addition, to measure the impacts of effective communication we use another questionnaire. All questions are designed in Likert scale and Cronbach alphas for two mentioned questionnaires were calculated as 0.92 and 0.74, respectively. The implementation of Pearson test as well as regression analysis have revealed that there were some positive and meaningful relationship between four personality traits, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and effective communication. In addition, there was a negative and meaningful relationship between neuroticism and effective communication.

Promoting complex global environment, tremendous growth and increase of network communication technology in the world, strategic planning and foresight activities in science and technology have become very important. Gradually, organizations and businesses are realizing the importance of foresight; many organizations attempt to execute such activities. However, this concept is not still well known in our country and among our organizations. Therefore, recognizing the factors influencing the success of this concept is a kind of issues that the organizations and activists are faced. Thus, this research seeks to identify and to rank the factors, particularly in the areas of economy, and it has developed five hypotheses. In this paper, factors affecting the success of foresight are given in four groups of rational, structure, scope, and results. Data collection for this study is a questionnaire and the binomial tests, Pearson correlation and Friedman test have been used to prove the hypothesis. According to the analysis of data obtained from the questionnaire conducted by SPSS software, all research hypotheses were confirmed. It also became clear that the rational component had the greatest impact on the future success of science and technology in the field of economic.

Ecotourism, as a multibillion dollars business, is an industry with high potentials for economic competition. One of the proper solutions for developing ecotourism is better identification of different regions where there is a tourism capacity and accurate planning for performing feasibility study of those regions in terms of attracting ecotourism as well as creating infrastructures in those regions. This paper evaluates capacities and power of tourism as well as nature tourism in Isfahan Township using Geographic Information System and Analytical Hierarchy Process. The present research is applied and research method is descriptive-analytical. Meanwhile, to analyze data, Arc GIS is used. Findings indicate that regarding the map of ecotourism capacity of Isfahan townships, resulted from combining various climatologically, geological, hydrological, topological maps and access maps, the township is not homogeneous in terms of nature tourism and coastal parts of the township (regions around Zayand-e-Rood) have better condition than other parts and should be considered for tourism development planning.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of different factors influencing on marketing in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in city of Tehran, Iran. The study has been accomplished among 57 SMEs out of 70 active business units who were involved in hand made carpet. The survey uses a questionnaire originally developed by Merrilees et al. (2011) [Merrilees, B., Rundle-Thiele, S., & Lye, A. (2011). Marketing capabilities: Antecedents and implications for B2B SME performance. Industrial Marketing Management, 40(3), 368-375.] to determine the factors influencing on marketing SMEs. Using structural equation modeling, the results of survey indicate that market orientation, management capability, innovation capability and brand capability of SME & apos; s marketing performance influence on development of marketing, positively.

The growing interest in mutual funds in Ghana has been tremendous over the last decade as evidenced by the continuous increases in number and total funds under management. However, no empirical work has been done on the selectivity and timing ability of the mutual fund managers. Using monthly returns data hand-collected from the reports of the mutual fund managers for the period January 2007-December 2012, this paper examines the market timing and selectivity ability of mutual fund managers in Ghana using the classic Treynor-Mazuy (1966) model and Henriksson- Merton (1981) model. The results suggest that, in general mutual fund managers in Ghana are not able to effectively select stocks and also are not able to predict both the magnitude and direction of future market returns. More specifically, all of the sample mutual fund managers attain significant negative selectivity coefficients and also most of them attain insignificant negative timing coefficients.

The boom of Internet usage and the significant funding dynamism in electronic banking have attracted the attention of researchers towards Internet banking. In the past, the traditional focus of Internet banking research has been on technological development, but it is now switching to user-focused research. This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine determinants of user acceptance of internet banking. The proposed study uses Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) technique to measure the relationships between different factors in a case study of Iranian firm. The results indicate that trust is the most important factor for development of internet banking.

In this study, we provide six complementary models of data envelopment analysis to analyze the financial efficiency of chosen decision-making units for firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange. For this purpose, we consider tapered modeling, the concept of accounting costs and economic costs and divide the whole process into the two sub-processes in modeling. After the modeling process, we choose the seventeen companies and thereby, provide a new method for analyzing the financial efficiency. The proposed method seems to be more appropriate than the methods proposed in the past and it can deliver better understanding of real-world cases. Finally, we understand that how this method works for analyzing the financial efficiency of organizations.